ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the use and function of the topic-marking particle wa in Japanese. It reviews the large existing literature on Japanese wa. The chapter examines the contrasting semantics of wa- and ga-phrases, a subtle and perplexing issue that has received considerable attention in the Japanese linguistics literature. It also examines intonational differences between wa- and ga-phrases. The chapter explores certain lexical semantic properties of wa- and ga-marked nouns in the CHJ corpus, and lists the types of argument roles most frequently marked by wa and ga. It offers a brief introduction to Japanese postpositional particles, including wa and ga. The subject-predicate distinction, which dates back to Aristotle, is a familiar one in English and other European languages. The subject of a sentence, in the traditional Aristotelian sense, is an entity of which something is said, or predicated. In Japanese, there is another very common type of sentence organization called the topic-comment structure.
